In conversation with OPEN

An OPEN Conversation with Li Hu

1    Excerpt from OPEN Manifesto

AJ (Andrew Jiao): In OPEN’s manifesto, “[architects] are eyes searching for hidden signs, ears catching imperceptible voices. We must discover, within each project, what is really needed, what is called for, and what must become.”¹ Following this excerpt, how would you describe the observations that inform your practice? And what do you search for that sparks your imagination?

LH (Li Hu): Everybody has a different capacity to perceive and understand based on their own sensibilities, philosophies, and beliefs. Each person sees the same thing differently. The perception, observation, and understanding beyond what you see are all very important parts of not just our practice, but our daily life, which often includes journeys to different places. Even when I am not traveling and just spending time in the office, there is still a lot to see. We have lots of plants in the office that are different every single day.

What exactly is going to make it into a design? I don't know. I don't look at things with a purpose in mind. But if we do a project on a specific site, for specific needs, for a specific client, or for a specific mass to use in the future, we start to research and discover something. I don't know what we will discover, but we will discover something through observations, testing, and experimentation with different ideas. In the end, a good design starts to link things together — some are obvious, some are less obvious, some are there, some are not there, some inspire other things to happen.

AJ: Also in OPEN's manifesto, and in discussions about the practice, your projects are searching for form and presence that fulfills not just the radical and the poetic, but also the modest and sublime potentials that architecture is capable of. What makes a work of architecture successful at possessing both of these things? How do you produce that capability in your practice?

2    Mau, Bruce., Leonard, Jennifer. Massive Change. Germany: Phaidon Press, 2004.

LH: I don't know what makes a project successful. We can only maximize our attention and effort for each project with no bias and judgment. To address your question about these similarly contradictory issues, perhaps it's the combination of my partner Wenjing and I being different individuals. We bring different perspectives to each project and the collaboration between us is important. Even within a person like me or Wenjing, we have different ideas that come with tension. In the end, this tension of balancing different dynamics makes the work more interesting. Radical ideas, in a way, are trying to bring some revolution, big or small, and some massive changes, to borrow Bruce Mao's words.² On the other hand, the work is sublime and poetic in the way that it touches subtleties, details, and material qualities. But is that contradictory to being radical? Not really. These elements co-exist. I think that creates a much more intricate, rich experience to the people who inhabit, visit, or pass by the space. That is really the nature of our effort for every project we do. So a good piece of architecture needs to balance a lot of things. [It needs] to be able to be both functional, efficient, but also interesting, inspiring, humorous and serious all at the same time.

JL (Jessie Li): There is also a pervasive interest in scale within your work ranging from urban proposals to architectural resolutions. How do you position everyday encounters within this shift in scale?

LH: It's very true that our interest lies in a wide spectrum of things. I have not had the opportunity to design a city yet. I don’t think anyone can really design a city anymore in this day and age. But it's our interest to imagine a street, a campus, a building, a room, down to a chair, or a door handle. To me, that's how I was educated and how I see what architects need to be able to do. But the underlying thing is really the same — it's about making something that you offer to the world that will bring people some joy. Joy doesn't mean just a smile. Joy can be something more serious. But to be able to navigate the scale, of course, it requires knowledge and experience. If I look at my daily work, I often jump from a detailed problem to a building to a campus. If you read a book or look at history, that's an even bigger scale. But ultimately, it's all human scale. When we look at a city, it is made of ordinary streets and architecture, which can also be thought of as a micro-city. If you look at our work, you may be able to see the sophistication of space, circulation, and the encounters even in the scale of a building. If you look at spaces through the encounters that occur within, it's very similar to how a good city works.

JL: We would also like to learn a little bit more about your managerial approach to each project. How does the team dynamic play into your creative processes?

LH:  We keep the office to around twenty people. We have two partners, so each of us runs a soccer team at maximum capacity. That’s about how much we can handle. I think we have enough size to produce interesting work but avoid being a large office. I'm not against big offices, but I just can't run a big office. I still have an old fashioned belief in the management of our creativity. Creativity comes from both individuals and the collective at the same time. With the loss of identity or creativity that happens in many bigger practices, they become purely commercial operations. Wenjing and I still manage every project, from direction, conception, and down to the final detail. Creativity also comes from research and discussion with young minds in the office and just more eyes looking at projects. Architecture can never be done by a single person. In our practice, we work together as a team effort. A team without being corporate is very important for us. We're always very alert about that. We're always quite stable at about twenty people, so we don't take on too much work. That balance enables even larger public works sometimes, but still enables us to have control over the details. It's not easy, especially with the speed of work in China. It's very, very challenging.

AJ: OPEN’s 2009 proposal to convert a historic highway loop in the capital from strictly automotive to a linear park called “Second Ring Beijing 2049” was recently re-exhibited at the Beijing Art Biennale in 2023. This was an early research project of the office, which was founded in 2009. Almost fifteen years later, are you surprised by the persistent interest in the project's approach to urban development?

LH: The way we understand the city has evolved. When we did “Second Ring 2049,” it was only a few years after we had just moved back to Beijing. I was frustrated with what I saw without fully understanding the mechanism behind it. I wanted to change everything, redo everything. But recent projects take on a slightly different approach. Instead of saying ‘I'm going to redesign the city,’ it's more about looking at what has really happened, what the city is now, and what opportunities exist in the problems of the city today. What can we do through this incomplete but still networked effort to change the city for the better? You could say it's more practical, but maybe it's more strategic and constructive. It's quite a different approach, but with the same aim to make the city a more livable place. Now, it's better to focus on making the city a more interesting and comfortable place attentive to young people. I think young people's life, the quality of their life, where they live, how they entertain, where they spend their leisure time, how they go to work, is very important for the betterment of the city. Though they are often ignored. If the young people are not happy and if the city is not attracting young people, the city has not much hope.

JL: We're also intrigued by the unique context of the UCCA Dune Art Museum in Qinhuangdao, China where the built form reconciles with forest, sand, and ocean. As architecture becomes one with the landscape, what do you see as the power behind this discreteness in architecture?

LH: Many people build in nature, and it's in our nature not to destroy nature. So we take on a very modest gesture to hide in nature. We hide ourselves inside the dunes. And by doing that, we are also protecting the dune. Because there's a popular museum embedded in that landscape, continuing urban development is not going to destroy the sand dune. Every time you build something, either in the city or in nature, you are establishing a connection between yourself and the environment. That's what a building does. It's very important to recognize that you are making connections very intentionally. In the case of UCCA Dune, the building really is an interface between you and the nature beyond, including the sun, light, and ocean. Not to mention the diverse and specific connections established between you and the art inside, and one art piece to the next in each subsequent room. When there's no art, it's empty. That is different from apartments, classrooms, or theaters. The dune can just be a void of emptiness. And if you go visit that space when it is empty, you can see this establishment of these connections more clearly.

AJ: Looking at the Chapel of Sound, a small semi-outdoor concert hall sited near a remnant of the Great Wall, you describe this project as "sophistication under simplistic image and precision disguised under roughness."³ Yet it is an undeniably unique project that, for some, is out of the ordinary. In what way is the building still ordinary?

LH: Well, I would say it is sophistication disguised under ordinariness. The Chapel of Sound to some people is ordinary. For some, it disappears into the landscape and becomes part of the landscape; some think it's strange and not ordinary — it depends. A building, perhaps a good building, presents multiple interpretations.

We made something that feels like it is part of the context. If you want to add something to nature then you should do it very carefully and not cause any damage to the site. That's why this building is upside down. It's large at the top and small towards the bottom. It sits in the valley and just barely touches the ground, almost floating, in a way. I think that is a very important gesture because you can easily imagine other major concert halls cutting up the site and blocking everything. We kept the stream flowing without disturbing the existing creeks or the stormwater passages. I think it creates a good dialogue with the surrounding valleys. The geometry of the building is also an inverse of the natural contour of the valleys. But that is a coincidence. The reason is actually that we wanted to have a small footprint on the site, which is also often the nature of theater space: the stage and the audience seating rise-up implies the geometry of the building.

But again, different people see things differently. When I first showed the model to the musician, Cui Jian, he said, ‘that looked like somebody kicking their foot up into the sky.’ Some see it as a big ear listening to the sound coming from the universe. Ordinary people will say: “oh, that's a rock.” So it depends. I like to say that it's like a musical instrument or a sound device. If you move around the building, its presence changes, too. I never drew a perspective for that project. In fact, when I design, I rarely draw perspectives. So it's very hard to photograph. There is no representative view in any project we do.

AJ: It's interesting that you don't draw perspectives when you design. What’s the reason behind that?

LH: I do sections, plans, axons, and details. It's not that I never do perspective, I just rarely do them. When I sketch, when I think, maybe sometimes I do. I don't want to be absolute. I draw perspectives if I come to a singular space, but when I think about the project from the beginning, it's never an image. It's not quite an image.

JL: In the new book A Radical Vision by OPEN: Reinventing Cultural Architecture, you discuss with critic and writer Catherine Shaw the innovative approaches that have been employed in blurring the boundaries between architecture, landscape, and art for contemporary Chinese cultural projects and public audiences. What are the most important factors to consider when designing a cultural program?

LH: I think the secret to our practice is that when we design the building, you don't take on the mission of designing a building as a building, that's it really. When we design, we're really designing the life inside the building, or in your term, programs. We ask questions such as what are the programs? Are these really the ones that best fit in this building? How do we place this program in the best configuration so that we orchestrate an interesting scenography or an interesting interaction between them? A building then comes naturally from this process. We almost work in reverse. Many people design a building and they don't care what goes inside. To them, it's about the shape of the building. But we work the other way around. Above all, what belongs to the building? Who are they? What do they look like? How do they work together? That's particularly important for a cultural building. For cultural architecture, what goes inside is almost as important or maybe more important than what it looks like. You are working towards the culture that happens inside. So you need to actively engage in creating the cultural programs. And we often do have that program and the opportunity to be involved in that process. Sometimes we even have the liberty to make changes to what was asked, at least develop a client's desire into that physical reality.

AJ: Lastly, what would you say is the single most important thing to remember as an architect?

LH: I think we need to be able to have the capacity to perceive the extra-ordinary from the ordinary. To be able to perceive that and be able to create extraordinary things out of the ordinary. I think that is the architect's mission. I see that as a mission.







Li Hu, a founding partner of OPEN, is an internationally known architect, visiting professor at the Tsinghua University and Central Academy of Fine Arts, China. He is a former partner of Steven Holl Architects, and director of Columbia University GSAPP’s Studio-X Beijing. Li received his B. Arch. from Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1996 and his M. Arch. from Rice University in 1998.


Li Hu co-founded OPEN with Huang Wenjing in New York City and established the studio’s Beijing office in 2008. Some major projects by OPEN include Sun Tower, Chapel of Sound, Tank Shanghai, UCCA Dune Art Museum, and Garden School.